Scientists in Britain Mull Secure Communication for Cloud Computing

Securing personal data in today’s digitized world is assuming greater importance with several security threats looming on the cyber horizon. Projects are underway, which are aiming at safeguarding of multi-party computation tasks.

Multi-party computation as a technology is aimed at helping groups of people compute personal functions with secret inputs while ensuring secrecy of inputs. Multi-party computation may be capable of offering significant benefits for cloud collaboration as it can help secure systems and protect user’s data from others.

Scientists of the UK-Danish region are partnering on a project to enable secure communication for cloud computing. The project goal is to enable real-world performance of the SPDZ protocol (where two machines work on multi part computation tasks whilst ensuring secrecy of their respective data). The description of the protocol SPDZ is: “secure against active static adversaries in the standard model, is actively secure, and tolerates corruption of n-1 of the n parties.

While the protocol allows some sharing, exclusive of inputs and computing tasks in the offline phase during the run up to the actual processing, during the online phase, secure computation is executed.

SPDZ depends on message authentication code to perform and its performance is hampered because users are required to provide their respective code to communicate in a system where the message authentication code is shared. The result is sluggish performance. Apart from the reduced performance, other challenges include a laborious key generation and weak security.

Successful testing and fine tuning of the SPDZ protocol could mean greater security to users seeking to protect their information.

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